Anna Nicole's Big Win

JUSTICE HAS SPOKEN and Anna Nicole Smith has been crowned victorious. The case -- one that has been significantly more interesting than Kelo v. New London and Grutter v. Bollinger -- involves the former Playboy playmate's drawn-out battle with her late husband's family over an estimated fortune of $1.6 billion. The Supreme Court's decision today in Marshall v. Marshall was less about celebrity and more about the "power of the federal bankruptcy courts to intercede in an ongoing state probate proceeding," according to The Post's Fred Barbash. But it doesn't mean quite yet that Smith will get her cut of her husband's estate, worth hundreds of millions. She now has to go back to a state court where the 11-year drama will continue.

It's a big day for Smith, but yet, the former stripper's Web site is mysteriously silent. Under the news section, she says:

I have so much to tell you about what's going on in my life. Why don't you check back soon and we'll catch up...

C'mon Anna Nicole! You need to let the masses know what's going on. Seriously, how are you going to spend your loot, assuming you get it? Will you use it to boost your career? Will you cash out of public life and disappear, not to bother us ever again?
Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post
» "Supreme Court Backs Ex-Playmate's Effort" [WaPo]

» STRAIGHT FROM ROSIE'S MOUTH: So if you haven't heard, Rosie O'Donnell will be taking Meredith Vieira's place on ABC's "The View." So let's turn to O'Donnell's Web site, where she blesses us with the kind of poetry that only Rosie O could write:

barbara walters asked me
if i would replace meredith -
should she go to nbc
yes i said instantly

there r those
in ur
4 u anything - file ...

barbara walters is in my
4 u anything - file
with gratitude

balance
the art of life
wax on - wax off

here we go

If Rosie O'Donnell cares about kids like she says she does, shouldn't she be teaching them the benefits of using proper English for communication? Just a thought 4 u. [Rosie]

» LEGACIES: In the urban planning file, we point you to Nicolai Ouroussoff 's piece in Sunday's New York Times about the legacy of Jane Jacobs, who died last week. The much beloved advocate of cities and communities built on the human scale, who saved part of Lower Manhattan from a huge freeway project, reshaped the national debate on urban renewal in the 1960s and 70s. Anyone in Washington in the 1960s who battled the proposal for an intricate network of freeways in the District of Columbia was certainly shaped by Jacobs' landmark 1961 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." But Ouroussoff says Jacobs' legacy is being abused by those who champion her work:

Perhaps her legacy has been most damaged by those who continue to treat "Death and Life" as sacred text rather than as what it was: a heroic cri de coeur. Of those, the New Urbanists are the most guilty; in many cases, they reduced her vision of corner shops and busy streets to a superficial town formula that creates the illusion of urban diversity, but masks a stifling uniformity at its core.

Certainly, those are lessons being experimented with in Washington. It will be interesting what the corner of U and 14th streets NW or for that matter, Clarendon's Market Common, will look like in 25 years, or even 50 years. [NYT]

» ORWELLIAN DREAM: There's a $1.3 million, transit-friendly farm for sale out in Fairfax where a horse will greet you on the front porch. Says our classifieds-obsessed brother Window Shopper:

... George Orwell was right -- once the animals take over the farm, they'll eventually realize capitalism is the way to go.

Do you get to keep the horse? [Window Shopper/Express]

Posted By Michael Grass at 4:39 PM on May 1, 2006 Tagged in Free Ride

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